1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of data management and specifically to database sharding by shard levels.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditional database systems include a single data server instance that serves all incoming requests for storage and retrieval of data. As an improvement to traditional database systems, many modern database systems are distributed such that multiple data servers collaborate to serve data.
A consequence of distributing a database across multiple data servers is the need to periodically add more data servers as the amount of data and/or the number of data requests increase. Adding more data servers changes the server distribution topology, often making the previous mechanisms for accessing the data servers obsolete. Further, in a distributed database system where data associated with the same entity is stored in the same data server, adding more data servers typically requires moving data associated with a single entity from one server to a new server to maintain read locality. Consequently, the process of adding data servers to a distributed data system is often a slow, processing intensive operation.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that enables the efficient expansion of a distributed data system.